


His Darkness

by Miss_M



Category: Near Dark (1987), True Detective
Genre: Crossover, F/M, Gen, Hitchhiking, M/M, Temptation, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-07 18:32:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5466797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three vampires give Crash a lift one night in Texas.</p>
            </blockquote>





	His Darkness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DeCarabas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeCarabas/gifts).



> Since the timelines of the two canons don’t quite match up, this is slightly AU, but definitely pre-movie and during Rust’s Crash period. Also, there’s no Homer or Mae. I own nothing.

“Whatchu think, Jesse? Drive-by pick-up for an early dinner?”

Severen laughed as he drove. He’d spotted the man standing with one foot on the tarmac and one foot on the gravel shoulder long before the headlights outlined him against the night. The three of them didn’t need the headlights to drive, used them only to avoid attracting unwanted attention. They’d managed to avoid killing any cops lately. Jesse didn’t shy away from a spot of cop-killing on general principle, but the nights went easier if they kept a low profile. 

The man by the side of the road held his thumb up in a way Jesse liked. Like he didn’t really care whether he got picked up or not, he just didn’t have anything else claiming his attention at the moment.

“He’s kinda skinny.” 

Diamondback heaved herself up from the crook of Jesse’s arm and looked over the front seats at the man’s rapidly approaching figure. Having delivered her verdict ( _dismissed for reasons of skinniness, Your Honor_ ), Diamondback plopped back and laid her head on Jesse’s shoulder. 

Jesse chuckled. “Give the man a fighting chance, gorgeous. Let’s offer him a ride, Severen.”

Severen flashed the lights as they passed the man, pulled over a ways ahead. Gravel crunched like chicken bones breaking under their wheels. 

The man took his time sauntering over. Jesse liked him more and more. It would be fun getting a rise outta this one before tearing out his throat. He wore a leather jacket with some shit-kicking bikers’ club’s logo, but he didn’t look like a biker. Too skinny, like Diamondback said. No beard. Junkie’s fevered eyes over hollow cheeks. Jesse could have smelled his musk and unwashed clothes even with just a mortal man’s sense of smell. 

Severen opened the passenger-side door. “Evenin’, partner,” he hollered. “Where ya headin’?”

“Laredo.” 

The voice was low and native to those parts. They were a mile out from a no-place town surrounded by peyote cacti, its electric lights fizzing and popping along the horizon in their rearview mirror. 

“This is your lucky night,” Severen said. 

The man leaned down and scanned the inside of the car without putting his head through the open door, taking the time to glance at all of their faces, the doors and windows, the likeliest places where a weapon might be hidden. A hunter, Jesse thought. Good. Should make things interesting. Not much did when you lived as long as Jesse. 

Finally the man folded himself into the passenger seat and shut the door. Severen threw the car into gear and peeled off with a spray of gravel. It made a sound like handfuls of earth striking a coffin in the distance.

“Much obliged,” the man said. 

Jesse met his eyes in the rearview mirror. The words were as polite as those of any man raised by a Southern mother, but the man didn’t turn his head when he spoke, so as not to appear to be thanking anyone in particular. Jesse bared his teeth in a smile. 

“Hell of a place to get stuck without a ride,” he said. 

Several seconds passed, eaten up by their tires, before the man replied, his eyes flickering between the view out the windshield and Jesse’s eyes in the mirror. “M’car died back in Mirando.”

“What’s in Mirando?” Diamondback asked. She was combing the fringe on her jacket with her fingers, as she often did when considering which part of a man to bite into. Tells like that were the reason why Jesse and Severen always beat her at poker.

“Yeah, was you lookin’ for somethin’?” Severen jumped in, grinning at his own joke. 

Jesse could tell Severen was toying with the idea of killing the stranger right there, in the moving car, or maybe pulling over and letting him attempt escape on foot, to work up an appetite. Thing was, Jesse was getting the distinct impression this man might not run if they did try to toy with him that way. He’d fight if they decided to attack him in the car, but he wouldn’t run. Curious. 

“At.” The man glanced at Severen, at Severen’s hands on the steering wheel, his profile, then he went back to contemplating, in turn, Jesse and the cone of empty road illuminated by the headlights. “Lookin’ at, not for. I was lookin’ at Mirando City’s famed peyotes. Man I know has a notion about ‘em.” 

“Yeah?” Severen baited, enjoying himself. “Your friend thinkin’ of gettin’ in on that action? He better make good with the cartels or they’ll festoon a cactus with his dick and ball sack. Might be he’ll still be attached to ‘em at the time.”

The man produced a thin smile, humoring Severen as he might a caged rattlesnake. “He ain’t my friend, and I never said he was smart, just that he has a notion.”

Jesse recognized the man’s smile. He’d seen smiles like that on the faces of other men he’d known long ago, men who’d come home from a defeat at war to find their homes and families pillaged and defiled by sneering men in blue uniforms. They saw death’s grin everywhere and returned it in kind, having nothing joyous to smile at anymore. 

Jesse’d found something to smile about soon after the war he’d fought and lost, but the source of his joy was not so much in life – or death, for that matter – as sorta sideways to it.

“Fuckin’ smartass, huh?” Severen was saying, duly baited. “Listen…”

“Lemme ask you something,” Jesse interrupted, addressing the man. “What’d you call yourself?”

“You can call me Crash.”

Less a name than a call-sign. Jesse approved. 

“Crash. Tell me. What do you hear when night is falling?”

In the crook of Jesse’s arm, Diamondback stiffened. She turned her head, her hair tickling Jesse’s throat, and looked at him. He looked back steadily, trusting her to trust his judgment. She didn’t relax, but she didn’t raise any objections either. Good enough.

Severen wasn’t gonna make things that easy, of course. “Jesse, what the fuck you…”

“Shut up, Severen, and let the man reply.” 

Severen fumed, but he held his tongue and drove. 

The man didn’t reply for a good long time, a mile at least. Jesse admired that. He could see this one becoming real integral to their little family unit, with his pretend name and his borrowed skin. Severen would be furious, which might be no bad thing. Severen’s crazy needed someone steady yet just as unhinged to counter it, and Jesse got tired of being that counterweight all the time. 

Jesse could feel Diamondback watching the stranger with a different kind of interest than when she’d assumed they would just drain him dry and dump him out of the car like empty fast-food wrappers. She moved on from playing with the fringe on her jacket to smoothing down the denim sheathing her thighs. She’d decided she wouldn’t mind a good, hard ride with the stranger, wouldn’t mind hunting with him rather than hunting him. Jesse’s feelings exactly.

Crash twisted around in his seat and looked at Jesse. He didn’t move his hands from where they rested on his thighs, yet Jesse knew he was thinking about the gun he had under his jacket. He was also thinking about Jesse’s question. If Jesse’s heart had still been capable of beating, it would have been galloping right about then. 

“Well, what do _you_ hear when night is falling?” Crash’s gaze never wavered from Jesse’s eyes, which he seemed to see clearly in the shifting darkness of the nighttime car. 

Jesse smiled broadly. “Show you mine first? Fair enough. I hear the earth sloughing off another day like a dry snakeskin, relieved to be rid of it. I hear the universe opening itself up to me like a lover, splitting itself open with possibility.” 

Jesse was staring at Crash and Crash was staring back, and Jesse could smell Diamondback’s mild disapproval of all this foreplay and Severen’s bubbling jealousy, and he didn’t give half a rancid shit for their opinions just then. Jesse’d be the one to bite the man, neither Diamondback nor Severen would challenge him on that. Jesse’d be the first one to fuck him too, it was only right, and teach him their ways. Jesse suspected Crash would be a quick study.

“Your turn,” Jesse said.

Crash took a long, slow, deep breath. Jesse could hear his blood thrumming in his veins. Goddamn, if the man lied and made up some bullshit now, Jesse would rip his head off from the backseat, he wouldn’t even tell Severen to pull over first.

“I hear the night come down with a tinkle, like wind chimes on a porch a coupla miles away,” Crash said. “So faint you almost don’t hear it, but you know you did hear it.” He paused before adding, more like he was picking the right words than hesitating: “It doesn’t smell dark, the night. It smells sort of yellow and orange, like an oil spill.”

No one moved for a long moment, except Severen kept cruising easily along the empty road. 

Jesse sat back (he hadn’t realized he was leaning forward to catch every breath of what Crash said), ran a hand through his hair, and ignored Diamondback’s raised eyebrow. She squeezed his knee in sympathy, but she was also pleased the man had failed Jesse’s test. It wasn’t that what Crash had said was wrong or a lie, it just wasn’t what the three of them needed in a fourth. Crash carried his own night inside him. It spilled out of the pockets of his leather jacket, welled up from his eye sockets. He would dance with his darkness any way he could, but he’d dance alone. 

Crash watched Jesse pull away from him, then he faced front again and leaned his head against his seatback. He didn’t smile or show any sign of pleasure. He understood darkness too well to gloat. They could still drain him dry, and on some level he knew it. 

Severen’s voice broke through Jesse’s mood. “Jesse…”

Their eyes met in the rearview mirror. Severen already looked disappointed, even before Jesse spoke. Severen would have liked, he would have fucking loved the chance to kill the man Jesse had wanted as one of them, then Severen would have crowed about it for months, and that was nothing Jesse wanted to have to put up with. 

“Whereabouts in Laredo you headed?” Jesse asked Crash.

The man clicked his tongue. “Anywhere with a payphone’ll do me fine.”

They left him at a service station on the outskirts, desert scrub lapping against the tarmac, the city a buzzing hive of electricity, gas lines, and so many lives stretched along the horizon, making it shimmer and jerk like the human impact on the land afflicted it with DTs.

Crash’s long limbs took a long time to leave the car when he climbed out. Jesse knew this was just his frustration talking, but he wished the man would hurry up and get. 

“Thanks for the lift,” Crash said.

“Stay frosty, man,” Severen wished him with fake good cheer, but the man had already shut the door and loped off, toward the payphones, the illusory safety of neon lights and other lives.

A moment of silence as for a dearly departed, then Severen upshifted. They still had to eat, and the night was wearing on. 

Of course Severen was the one who just couldn’t keep his mouth shut. Diamondback knew better and was more patient, even if eventually she’d give Jesse shit for wanting to try out a junkie, get a buzz off the chemicals in his bloodstream. 

“Dunno why we didn’t suck him down to a dry husk,” Severen muttered as he glanced from left to right, looking for a hobo, another hitchhiker, a bar about to close with only a few patrons left. “Weren’t nothin’ special about him, one guy for the three of us…”

Diamondback sighed. “Severen, shut the fuck up, OK?”

Severen flipped her off without taking his eyes off the road, but he shut up as requested. 

Jesse didn’t owe them explanations. He was the eldest, he had found them both, taught them both, he knew what was best and what they all needed. 

They were his family, his kind, his only ones. He owed them something. 

“It wasn’t his time,” Jesse said, as though speaking for the indifferent night’s benefit alone. “He’s got a ways to go before the night claims him.” Which explained everything and nothing, wouldn’t soothe ruffled feathers any better than Jesse lying that he’d simply changed his mind would have done.

Severen snorted in response, hawked and spat by the gas pedal, and Diamondback laughed. 

Jesse let them throw their weight around a little, just enough to reclaim their rightful places in his world. He could well imagine driving through Laredo in fifty years’ time and seeing the same man by the side of the road, his thumb held up more like a middle finger extended to the universe than a plea for a ride, his face leathery with old age, still sniffing the air for the night’s blooming colors. Everything in nature moved in circles, cycles of recurrence. Even so, Jesse knew with the certainty of a cast-iron survivor that he would not be Crash’s darkness, not if they met each other around every twist in the road from that night until the end of recorded time.


End file.
